Belegarth

by **Sir Cairbre** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 9:14 am

Two weeks ago we, fightcolumbus.com, broke out into myspace advertising. Let me go through the process so far.

First we created a new E-mail : myspace@fightcolumbus.com and registered a Myspace called “FightColumbus Belegarth” under that E-mail. Then we got a few guys who are working on getting the group up and running all on board with the password. And made the E-mail we registered forward to our E-mails. We did a little basic layout, uploaded a recent picture from WPO that has one of our members in the background as our avatar/profile pic. I had made some fliers as well and we posted them up with links to fightcolumbus.com too. Then I invited all my “Belegarth” and sword fighting friends from my myspace page to be friends with our new account. A couple of days later we had just under 50 friends. Maybe 5 of them were from Columbus. We sat on the account for a while and got some new members to our BB, so I added them to the myspace page as well.

Then we got dirty. I was working late at work waiting for computers to do stuff so I decided to go get some new friends: First stop, every sword fighters E-mail address I could find in Columbus. I did some looking around and found about 180 E-mails of fighters in the area; they netted me something like 50-70 myspace pages. Add those as friends. A couple of days later we had over 100 friends total. So I did some more searching; turns out the park we use there is a zombie event in the fall where people dress up like zombies and walk around town, a “Zombie Walk”. Well they have a myspace page and 2K friends. After several hours of work all their Columbus area friends had been invited as our friends. Turns out the local AMPG fighters have a myspace, there is another 50 invites.

Last night we hit 500+ friends on our myspace page. When we add new friends we group them: 350+ are all in the Columbus area, ~50 are bands, and about ~100 are from other places. We try to post bulletins every couple of days; nothing like advertising to your demographic through myspace.

Lots of people have said hi, that looks interesting, etc. Yesterday was our first Thursday practice and one of the zombie walkers came and watched from a distance (mind you we are not sure where she was, there were 3 crowds of over a dozen people watching us from different corners of the park at one point). They commented on our page after practice and we sent them a message back, next week they are going to come and fight for the first time.

Right now we have jived up a lot of interest through myspace. We might be really lucky with the zombie walk group in our area. But we haven’t started hitting up the friends of the ~50 bands we have, which is next on my list, if we can’t hunt down SCA and Nero fighters quickly. There are also other festivals at our park that we will hit up as well, I suspect many of their Columbus myspace friends will be within a couple of blocks of the park and it might stir up some interest.

So check out our Myspace page.

by **Eris** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 1:21 pm

THis sounds like a decent idea... I'll see if I can get someone in DeKalb do handle this for us... I only have the internet at work, and cannot spend that much time devoted to non-work related stuff...

by **Cyapar** » Sun Mar 22, 2009 9:17 am

So sweet! I just sent a friend request.

by **Sir Cairbre** » Mon Mar 30, 2009 8:16 am

The turnaround from our myspace campaign is becoming true ridiculousness. Last week one of myspace leads netted 4 people to practice. I have 2 different additional people / groups interested in coming to practice as well. At this rate I think a national myspace campaign might have the power to double Belegarth's population in 2 years.